Disclaimer. I’m invested in IOTA, Ethereum, and Bitcoin. I’m not connected to the IOTA foundation and the following post is my own work and opinion. This is not meant to deter the collaboration of legitimate scientists. The IOTA Foundation is always grateful if thinkers help IOTAs adoption and vision.

Bells and Whistles

This is my response to the “responsible disclosure” of would-be neutral scientists that are destroying the reputation of IOTA, but also of the MIT (media lab), the Boston University (one associated developer), and Forbes.

In these times, fake-news and tinfoil stories can be found everywhere. The following post could be just a big coincidence, but if we allow ourselves in connecting some dots, maybe we get a better picture of “cryptoland”.

I’ll say it upfront: Competing projects try to harm IOTA as much as possible.

Let me start with this tweet of “fnord” because this pretty much sums up my motivation to write this summary.

No, cryptographers looking at it is awesome. Writing a hit piece and going around bragging about how the price tanked afterwards not so much

Unwinding all the details becomes unnecessary, but I’ll highlight the important ones:

IOTA has never been hacked.

CURL was tested under ludicrous conditions. The victim’s system would be running malicious code. In those conditions, stealing the key is trivial and much easier and effective. (custom wallet)

The discussed signing algorithm CURL was in an old version of IOTA, that was patched weeks ago. IOTA is using SHA-3/Keccak right now, there was no vulnerability to start with, but even less of a chance after that change.

In the meantime, Ethan Heilmann retweets an incredible total of 49 defamatory and blatant tweets. These were clearly, important and necessary actions by any reputable, objective scientist, both in content and form.

A few examples:

Madars Virza follows the crowd and tweets funny stuff about the legitimacy of the whole idea of IOTA:

One of many Twitter-reactions by Amy Castor, that already blocked me, and many other accounts that expressed criticism:

Amy Castor is already convinced that IOTA is a scam. She is working for Bitcoin Magazine and she’s a member of the Bitcoin Core Slack. Again, just another coincidence. Her agenda “don’t roll your own crypto” seems like a general campaign against former or recent initial coin offerings ( ICO’s)

Numerous tweets show her biased stance against IOTA. Some of which are pointing to sources on Bitcointalk and weird websites, that obviously try to discredit IOTA. Some others are just asking to know what are David Sønstebø’s benefits, what his incentive is for creating IOTA. – this is something that he explained more than once in a very clear way.

On top of that, Bitcoin Evangelist Andreas M. Antonopoulos tweets misinformation to justify the smear campaign:

BullshitShooting messenger to cover their own lack of competence@neha used responsible disclosure practices. @iotatoken had shoddy crypto

Responsible disclosure

Now, apart from this little list of tweets against IOTA, I’m going to look at the definition of “responsible disclosure“.
it says:

Responsible disclosure is a computer security term describing a vulnerability disclosure model. It is like full disclosure, with the addition that all stakeholders agree to allow a period of time for the vulnerability to be patched before publishing the details. Developers of hardware and software often require time and resources to repair their mistakes. Hackers and computer security scientists have the opinion that it is their social responsibility to make the public aware of vulnerabilities with a high impact. Hiding these problems could cause a feeling of false security. To avoid this, the involved parties join forces and agree on a period of time for repairing the vulnerability and preventing any future damage.

As we already know, the report of the Zcash, DAGlabs and Lighting Network devs was written as if there was a problem in effect, although the issue was already corrected.

Also, the Forbes article, that is written in present tense followed by the meetup title.

I conclude that in this case there is no “social responsibility to make the public aware of vulnerabilities with a high impact” because there is neither a vulnerability nor high impact.

Apparently, however, they seem to have the need to showcase IOTA’s alleged vulnerability, because the cryptographer decided to set up a live stream meetup to break CURL, the signing algorithm of IOTA.

They write:

“Now that all parties are out of stealth mode, I can formally announce that Ethan Heilman will be demonstrating how he, along with three researchers from MIT Digital Currency Initiative (DCI), broke IOTA’s nonstandard “Curl” hash function.

By doing so, they revealed in a $2B cryptocurrency a serious security flaw that could have allowed a hacker to steal user funds. (IOTA has since lost about 25 percent of its value, according to Coin Market Cap.)”

And they seem to also assume that when all cryptos are taking a plunge, IOTA shouldn’t have been affected. Even more interesting.

Now, to draw a conclusion

In theory, IOTA is a technology that is able to outperform almost every other cryptocurrency.

Especially the Lightning Network, that is trying to address Bitcoins scaling problems, and Zcash, that is possibly threatened by Masked Authenticated Messaging are in a direct competition with IOTA, let alone DAGlabs.

If independent scientists of a renowned faculty like the MIT or Boston University claim to be able to break IOTA, people listen, the market reacts immediately.

In order to make the public aware of vulnerabilities with a high impact, and to save people from losing money, they did disclose information in an unethical and wrong way, which added significantly to the loss of valuation. If that is not irony, I don’t know what is.

But these guys are not just rational, independent scientists. These people are investors and developers of competing projects, so no wonder that the tweets were written accordingly. Coincidental of course.

Direct conflicts of interest:

To support my thesis that this is a coordinated effort I point out the blatant and obvious conflicts of interest.

Ethan Heilmann and developer of DAGlabs.com, a direct competitor to IOTA (also Bitcoin Core developers involved). Due to almost 50 anti-IOTA tweets, I assume that he wants to change the sentiment or just coincidence

His project DAGlabs is in a fundraising right now.A direct competitor developing their own DAG solution and currently trying to acquire Series A funding partners. Coincidence.

Amy Castor is working for Bitcoin Magazin and is postulating questionable insults against the IOTA Founder while she is a member of the Bitcoin Core Slack and following an anti-ICO agenda. Bitcoin Magazine. Coincidence

To Cite Satoshiwatch: “Amy Castor – who propagated MIT’s malicious report/attack in the Forbes, is a writer for CoinDesk, Barry Silbert’s Digital Currency Group (DCG)
-“DCG ownership and crypto-investments include Zcash, Ripple, Rootstock, and etc.” Coincidence

Tadge Dryja is working for the Bitcoin Lightning Network, a direct competitor of IOTA. Coincidence

Centralization of the Coordinator:

Concerning the coordinator(Coo), it seems like no one is missing an opportunity to point out that the Coo centralizes IOTA. The Coo is a special node in the hands of the IOTA Foundation that sets milestones in order to prevent Sybil attacks.

If people want to attack the network, they try to become an omnipresence in order to conduct doublespends.

This protection is necessary as long as the network is in its infancy. The transparency compendium pointed this out and it’s common knowledge, that it’s solely for the purpose of protection. The developers cannot alter transaction or access seeds.

Just the day before yesterday, an attacker tried to take over the Tangle.

To make it clear what’s happening, he added a tag to the transaction: “BZWFL99FUCK9CORE99LETS9FORK”

The coordinator prevented a takeover from happening, everything is safe and sound.

But its purpose to protect the users of IOTA is of low significance, as it seems. People rather point out that due to the Coordinator, the whole system, idea, network is worthless. What a hypocrisy considering their biased stance.

At this point, I’m asking myself, why are these people insisting that the coordinator is a bad component? Obviously, the term centralization is undefined, because looking at this definition I could just claim that IOTA is still decentralized, especially because there are no blocks, no miners, the validation of transaction is not decoupled but in the hand of the users, unlike Consensus at Bitcoin. The comparison between blockchains and the Tangle looks therefore wrong, because of the “centralized part”, the coordinator has no participation in the consensus model.

When I look at Bitcoin, the true centralization happens due to the power of miners, where five of the biggest mining farms set 51% of the global Bitcoin hashpower.

Furthermore the centralization of developers, one can easily recognize when you look how many Bitcoin Core developers are connected with side projects or react in unison when a shitstorm is formed.

An incestuous innovation ivory tower, if you ask me.

If this was only about following science ethics, why would they fabricate a lurid headline, that clearly suggests that IOTA is still vulnerable?
Why would objective scientists talk about a crashing price and retweet dozens of tweets with an anti-IOTA sentiment?
Why would they decide to make a live-stream to showcase how to break CURL, although it’s not used anymore?

As a side note: The IOTA devs have not been invited to defend themselves or to talk about their point of view.

Since none of the mentioned persons kept a neutral stance, I can only conclude that this is a coordinated effort to destroy IOTAs reputation as ultima ratio because IOTA threatens their own projects.

Neha Narula, as the director of the MIT Media Labs, missed the chance to provide an independent peer-review of IOTAs -not in use- signing algorithm CURL.
Instead, she allowed that her team used its personal bias for their own purposes.

Amy Castor abandoned the ethics of journalism: “The duty of the journalist is to further those ends (justice and the foundation of democracy) by seeking truth and providing a fair and comprehensive account of events and issues.” when she started ranting her personal agenda like a bulldozer and furthermore acted highly unprofessional against IOTA Founder David Sønstebø.

Her lacking ethics may be motivated by the fact that she has written about Zcash, at this point I can only assume that she owns Zcash, or it’s just another coincidence:

This “responsible disclosure” is not the work of objective, competent scientists of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or the Boston University as proclaimed. This is the epitome of a conflict of interest, where people use the names of big institutes.

In the game-theory, there are only rational agents. It seems these scientists are rational in that sense.

To cite Prof. Dr. Harald Lesch: “The economization of science is a problem: performance instead of position.”-Especially in the field of crypto currencies.

Interesting to see that Zcash, DAGlabs and Bitcoin enthusiasts develop the same habits when they talk about IOTA, the same kind of habits that banks used to, when they talked about Bitcoin back in the days.

So if this is the business conduct of the MIT Media Lab, the Boston University or Forbes, I wonder where we can still find unbiased science and information.

We often talk about IOTA as the new distributed ledger that promises a financial and infrastructural solution in a world where fees for transactions act as a barrier to progress, especially in the IoT.

But how big are the present existing fees for a system like the IoT? Do we really have a problem?

I tried to find out! Very amateurish, I might add, but enough for this purpose.

Pre-conditions:

A bigger issue in estimating a none-existing number such as the “global-transaction-fee-index” is to find systems that are overall able to deliver the necessary services globally.

I take the liberty and define the “global-transaction-fee-index” as an indicator that shows the impact of the “mean fees” that would be added to a value transaction in the IoT.

The lower this index is, the worse it is for the IoT (shown with an example under “conclusion”).

This number is almost certainly utter bullshit but it gives us an idea how expensive and cumbersome transaction fees could be.

For my evaluation, I made a list of relevant requirements for present services:

the service needs to be fast (financial state of the art)

the service needs to be available almost everywhere (high adoption)

the service needs to be a commonly used technology right now (no proof of concept)

the service needs to be a system that is documented well enough to be assessed

This list supposedly isn’t complete but should be enough for this assessment.

For my calculations, I furthermore held to the very conservative estimate for the IoT-devices by Gartner of approximately 30 billion devices in 2020 (Source: Gartner)

We can assume that not every single device will be used for shifting values because a big piece of the pie will just be connected to submit data in any way.
But my relatively high estimation, especially because of new emerging e-markets, is still around ~5%.

This little assessment, therefore, starts with a number of 1.5 billion devices that need to shift value just once a week in 2020

I have no idea if this is close to reality but we have to start somewhere, so this acts as a reference.

If you find any serious, scientific approach to transaction fees in the IoT, I would be happy to get it somehow!

The services I found that held up to the requirements are no surprise:

Swift /wire transfer (globally active instead of national-remittance)
Paypal (most popular payment service – highest online adoption)
Visa (also a globally used service with access to markets everywhere on the planet)

Even Bitcoin would *only* generate fees about 1.125 billion Dollar per week if the scalability would stay at 75cents per transaction, which isn’t the case, sadly.
The scaling of Bitcoin would lead to much higher transaction fees due to the big number of 1.5 billion transactions per week. But I don’t know how much that would be and furthermore, Bitcoins adoption is not as advanced as the mentioned services. So this is irrelevant.

When futurologists talk about their vision, we can read their words, we can somehow fathom their ideas but it’s always hard to draw an image before our inner eye.
In this article, I’m trying to create my own image of what lays ahead 25 years from now.

Well, 25 years are not that much you may ask?
Think back. 1992. The Internet, “just a trend anyway” some said, was run with 4 terabytes a month -worldwide. We kiddos either used our time with Looping Louie or with our precious Tamagotchi. Nope, that was 1997. These were different times. No digitalism, no data-streams, no online gaming, no cell phone for everyone except Miami-Vice in his Cabriolet. No Whats app, hell it was even a pain in the ass to gather all our friends at the doorsteps which were one, five or ten streets away.
We played Ghosts n’ Goblins on the Commodore 64, single-player. Or Commander Keen.
We had a bike, a football, a doll and if grandma was generous a Game-boy with Tetris and Super Mario Land.
We jumped because Kriss Kross told us so, and if our crush didn’t want to meet us, we heard November Rain. And at this point, I feel pretty old and analog.

Today, we have Blogs, we trade crypto-currency, and we get creepy ad recommendations into our browser to buy a virtual reality headset to slay some 3D mummified bear sharks, because we googled it to buy it on Amazon.

Today, we tinder to have sex with a housewife “just 3 miles from here!”

The last sentence alone would be enough to trigger a stroke or two in 1992.

But here we are. We live in a totally digital world. One geomagnetic storm from the sun could be enough to kill our economy, if our Internet provider has maintenance, we get bored in a second. We want to be wired. Weird.

25 years from now would be the same “mind-clusterfuck” for us now like 2017 would be for people from 1992.

“Smells like teens spirit” from 1992 could be considered an oldie, even Skrillex. Agony.

People won’t have a cellphone, but a communication chip, implanted in their shoulder.

On this chip, enough data space to store the history of mankind of the last 3000 years.

People can hear music, paid per view, paid per seconds you listened, activated with colored Logitech buttons within their vision, comparable to a digital head-up display. Your arm is your mouse.

Time will be shown on your skin, with ferrofluid, formed as numbers with an electromagnet, powered by body heat.

It is uncommon to buy software in 2042. Software is provided. If you want to use it, use nano-payments for the time you enjoy its service.

Electric cars don’t need to have parking tickets. They drive autonomously through the gates and pay the amounts you need for them to stay, at the end of the visit.

We won’t use paper, except for, well some things can’t be done digitally. Hygiene is conservative.

The water you use instead will be paid without you even noticing. Also groceries, medicine and porn.

You have an automated calculation for your bills. If you ever be short of money, you will be reminded 6 months before you run out of crypto. You don’t even have to think about cash, everything is online, automated, done behind closed algorithms.

At this point, let’s not talk about the development of housewives in your neighborhood.

Instead: Marriage contracts. They will be saved within a crypto-currency. People will get a certificate and celebrate their unique hash of love.
Uhhh, the hash starts with 4444! Fortune for the family. Good times ahead.

25 years from now, we need to be wired. We will depend on connections. And we won’t pay for it. Neither for connections nor for shifting values.

In our very future, we have some greater things to do than paying for payment.

We still have these annoying Facebook friends we don’t really know, but constantly get Candy Crush invites from.

In the future, it is called Holo-book though, and these damn 3D-diamonds are crushing through your roof. The sensor data of the IoT managed to find out where you are, in what state of sleep you are and which color you like the most. People pay advertisements based on this data, available because the Tangle saved the information.

If we are unlucky, then Justin Bieber is running for Presidency in 2042. Since 2017, this kind of scenario isn’t made by Stephen King anymore as we all know.

Humanity has a lot of construction sites in 2042 besides Holo-book.

The climate-change won’t be a boring subject in school, but ever-repeating hurricanes in 6 months a year.

Sequencing DNA to save people from countless diseases will be accomplished with a tangle-based “world-computer”. All for one, one for all. Progress.

If you ask me, 2042 will be hard to grasp. But damn, I’m really curious what lies ahead.

Hey Folks!

Lots of important stuff has happened since my last entry so time to sum it up for you! Fasten your seatbelts, IOTA is on its way to launch its rockets!

Light wallet is already in beta test

-The light wallet is already completed and beta tested while I’m writing. With this wallet, people are able to work with IOTA, conduct transactions and claim their IOTA’s but they don’t need to manually add neighbors. They just need to add one peer to be connected to the main net. This software is a big step to connect to a broader range of people especially if they are not that tech-affine or interested in spending too much time on adding neighbors.
As this service is not the focus for IOTA’s future in hindsight of its machine-economy, it is very important to get more people on board.
One successful point on the list to get ready for official exchanges.

Free server for the coming light wallet:

-@moodledidoodledi and @scottjp as the owner of www.iotasupport.com are happy to announce a newly set up server to provide users of the light wallet with a peer-IP.
Iotasupport.com is proudly supported by http://www.blockchain-research.de/ and would be grateful to get donations to keep up the support and service they provided for months now!
Iotasupport.com became a reliable source of information and provided help for countless people, so let’s help them out! These guys deserve it!

Mobile wallets are also beeing tested

Needless to say that this mobile wallet is a big important addition to the software spectrum, the community has created. Great work Oliver, Sascha and Adrian!
The team behind http://iotawallet.info/ provided us with an important piece of software on the long road to mass adoption and the listing at exchanges so if you can spare a coin or two,
donate and show them some love!

@bahamapascal set up 6 nodes for a better network.

On behalf of the Blockchain research lab, Pascal took his time to set up 6 additional nodes for a better connection within the tangle. Great work!
If you struggle to find enough peers for your wallet, pm @bahamapascal in slack and share your (if possible) static-Ip with him to be a part of the tangle.

This also applies for all members of #nodesharing in the slack. If you need peers, pm people in nodesharing and share your IP.

The server costs were supported for 2 months by http://www.blockchain-research.de/ so I’m pretty sure Pascal would also be happy to get a few coins for his support and efforts for the upcoming months of support!

IOTA C# implementation.

Tomer Krisi (@Artik123) delivered an incredible piece of work: He just ported IOTA to C-Sharp.
This is a BIG step towards a better distribution, getting more developers into IOTA . Also: this was voluntarily done. What a great job!

New foundation-members

-Chris Skinner joined the IOTA foundation as an advisor! This is an invaluable addition to the already astonishing expertise, the IOTA foundation managed to bring together.

-A new OTC bot provided with the excellent service of Yassin (@yassinnxt) is life to enable trading before IOTA is listed on official exchanges.
@come-from-beyond took his precious time and integrated this bot in slack.
This service was set up to provide a temporary solution as CORE is occupied with important tasks behind the curtain. The bot is pretty cool considering the automatic features it provides.

The OTC-bot service assisted by Yassin works as follows:

1. You send BTC or iotas to an address provided by Yassin (via private message)
2. Yassin executes a command to deposit the accordant amount to your balance tracked by the bot
3. You buy/sell iotas (this can happen as many times as you need)
4. You send Yassin an address to withdraw the earned BTC/iotas
5. Yassin adjusts your balance and sends real tokens to your address
6. Trades are taxed with 0% fee.
7. Deposits/withdrawals are charged with 1% fee (rounded up).
8. Min amount of a deposit/withdrawal is 10’000 microBTC/2 Gi.
9. To get instructions on how to trade iotas once you get your tokens on the balance type “HELP” on #trading channel.
10. As a precaution, you are advised to provide Yassin with an extra BTC and IOTA-address to be able to receive your funds once you left slack for different reasons, such as a ban or technical issues.
11. For each IOTA deposit, a new address must be generated. This is necessary to show the right balances for each entry listed by the bot.
12. For better usability, Gi and microBTC for fees are always rounded. (1Gi for 2GI-100Gi, 2Gi from >100Gi-200Gi and so on)

The service was tested with test tokens, but it is still possible that an undiscovered bug may lead to a loss of all your BTC/iotas, so we suggest to trade small amounts per session.

-@bahamapascal and @strongwares created a node-sharing manager. I will deliver more info about that when I tested this tool myself. Great work!

-Dom wants developers to start coding real PoC for bounties! If you are interested: Go into Slack and offer your help and I’m pretty sure he can provide you with some inspiration!

If you are capable and creative: Take this chance and become a part of IOTA! You won’t regret it.

Blockchain research!

The Blockchain Research Lab of the University of Hamburg is pleased to announce the first of our Blockchain Monitor surveys. It forms the basis for creating a sentiment index about blockchain use cases in finance.

So, this is another conflict of interest of the DCI.
This pretty much proves the dirty business conduct of the MIT Media Lab, Joi Ito, and the DCI.
And people still think IOTA are the criminals... you can't make that up.